


Non sofre Santa Mamiina

by PerpetuaLilium



Category: Simoun
Genre: Angst, Class Issues, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Historical Memory, Lost Love, Memories, Popular Piety, Post-Series, Religion, Religious Fluff, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Religious Veneration, Saints, Series Spoilers, religious angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 17:54:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/864912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerpetuaLilium/pseuds/PerpetuaLilium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some years after going to the Spring, Rodoreamon and Yun begin to notice that popular expressions of piety in the changing Simulacran religious milieu are taking on a tinge of veneration towards somebody they knew very well.  How do they feel about this?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Non sofre Santa Mamiina

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rosage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosage/gifts).



> DISCLAIMER: This fic uses a lot of the imagery of Christian popular piety in medieval Europe in the context of the fictional world and religion presented in Simoun. This use is an imaginative exercise in examining the potential in-universe ramifications of the actions of a character who if real would meet or at least very closely approximate certain ideals of sainthood. It is not meant to imply any sort of diminished status for Christianity in general or for the particular types of popular piety which it most closely resembles. I as a Christian bound to the Apostolic and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds feel the need to make this clear.

A knock on the door to the old study where her father had once pored over maps and books without much aim to it and where she was now busy writing a monograph on Erali’s great novel _Streaming Sky,_ and Rodoreamon looked up. In came two women in the white robes and veils of the servants of the Keeper of the Spring, and with them they bore two small books.

‘Keeper Yun asks that you look at these, Your Ladyship,’ one said, and they placed the books on her desk and bowed.

Standing, she bowed, said ‘I thank you,’ and sat back down again as they left.

It happened naturally, as it often did in these listless days when the wars had finally stopped.

Glancing at their photograph and back to the books again, she saw that these were more in the _Moral and Religious Exemplars_ series. Seeing the subject, she lifted her lips in a faint shy smile.

*

It was heroic. A saint, a martyr, a paragon.

It had started normally, naturally, from the greater mass of the people arising, as soon as it had become clear that the girl whom Halconf had selected as their representative and hope had been killed, as soon as the government’s injustices to her had become known; and when the war ended, as soon as the Plumbish authorities made known the shocking circumstance of her death. The people, clamouring at the farcical peace, clamouring for a real peace, had made it clear, their desire, their respect, their grief. She had fallen from the heavens into a glade of edelweiss in the Stone Mountains and risen once more in their regard and in their gaze—just as in the Spring her relic had risen into Tempus Spatium’s embrace.

Her body was taken and buried in the crypts of the Lords Mofas of Belial, without much fuss, on Lord Rahef’s orders, before the news had spread and percolated and burst out. As such when the popular veneration began the relics were nonsense: Locks of hair from other girls with the same hair colour, snippets of clothing from whatever (former) sibyllae or (former) cadets could be found, bits of tooth or bone taken from animals found dead by road or rail, taken and sold without scruples to the masses teeming and screaming for consolation. And it was by these false reliquaries that the real girl was hallowed; it was by this insincere recognition that the honest person acquired the nobility of spirit that did not depend upon rank.

It was supported by the Plumbish priestesses coming through the land. During the second war Rodoreamon saw those loyal to the exiled Consul of Plumbum who had been exiled with him travelling the roads telling miracle stories and putting on passion plays, and in between the unfamiliar Plumbish names and tales and mores the occasional yet more and more frequent presence of that figure who was, for Rodoreamon, unavoidable as consolation, inconsolable as memory. As the religions mixed and wed there were processions and pilgrimages of ecstatics or ascetics, dancers or flagellants, and on so many lips, waxing and waxing, the story of the love that surpassed all others and the way it had sprung forth from those dying lips, treated as a saint’s benediction.

People who were familiar with the story would send her talismans and amulets, all of them featuring oddly-drawn girls with dark braided hair, in aerial flight suits or earthly brown vestments or celestial white robes, or old newspaper clippings with grainy photos of the girl standing proudly next to Halconf or gazing at the camera on a flight deck with the look of challenge in her eyes. Things  became strange when they began to posit intercession; stranger when emissaries sent from Yun or from her counterpart Plumbish Oracle said that such claims could not be debunked or disconfirmed, and when Yun began the project of reconstruction and revival, treating her, her whose flaws and merits Rodoreamon and Yun had known more than anyone, indeed loved more than anyone except possibly for her poor mother and uncle and aunt and cousins, as an exemplar, a herald, a guide to the new world that Aaeru and Neviril had opened.

There was a more theoretical interest in Aaeru and Neviirl; material for abstract theology and abstract reverence. As an exemplar—as, especially, the patron and protector of the poor, as she was taken—she whom Rodoreamon loved was a great deal more immediate, more direct. That was the way it was with sainthood, as the ancients had understood it. Erali’s great influence Nohelisf had written about this.

*

Once, Rodoreamon had heard a folktale involving an old farmer who was trying to get back at a young miller who had been cheating him.  The traditional form of this story, which was very well-known and with which she had been familiar since about the age of ten, involved, at one point, the twentieth-century religious leader Felacan coming in disguise, as she had been wont according to the histories, to help the farmer out. The person telling it this time as she had heard it, at a hotel bar in the countryside a few miles outside her family’s lands, had substituted this new helper of the poor. The strangest part, as far as Rodoreamon had been concerned, was how well it had worked.

She had had a lot to drink that night.

*

People came to her door singing the devotional songs of the pilgrims, and asked her what she, as one who had known the saint above almost all others, and as one who had worked closely with Yun both before and after she had become Keeper, could tell them about those times, and those places, and that great open romantic sky. Their daughters were now allowed to fly in that sky once again, but nobody thought it would ever be the same, not really.

And Rodoreamon redirected them to the church that they were building in a certain village, scraping together the meagre earnings of the smallholdings there, and, bemused, lonely, and blissful, let the development of the cultus continue, as, greeting her love across time and space but not praying to her, for their love exceeded prayer and was the basis of it, she went back to work, writing long into the evening, riding between town and country to speak and teach, praising or criticising the government as the case may deserve, bringing beauty and the truth that was beyond reality into the world so far as she felt able, letting the well of her love be filled with wisdom.


End file.
